Wale, Rick Ross and the Realities of Rock Star Living

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The fast and furious lifestyles of rappers, DJs, producers, their teams, journalists, and others in the music industry don’t leave a lot of time for focusing on good health. Lately, the pressures of the industry have been taking a toll on some of the top names in the game, and hopefully, scaring the rest of us into paying more attention to diet and physical fitness.

Just last week, Rick Ross, leader of the Maybach Music Group (MMG) movement, suffered two seizures in the same day aboard two separate airplanes. While rappers like Ross may seem invincible on the mic, the realities of managing health concerns, especially those that disproportionately affect Black men, hit them hard, sometimes in the primes of their careers.

AllHipHop.com asked MMG rapper Wale recently about the difficulties of balancing hard work and hard partying with healthy decisions on a daily basis:

AllHipHop.com: When it comes to rap artists, how do you or should you take care of your health?

Wale: There’s no format to it. I think that’s the bad part. A lot of entertainers don’t really know how to take care of themselves. Nobody really showed us to do it the right way. Everybody is not so good with going to the gym or to the doctor. A lot of us as artists are not really people-persons; a lot of people take a lot of drugs or smoke a lot to deal with it. A lot of rock n’ roll people, they took a lot of drugs because it’s a lot of questions and a lot of pressure and a lot of repetitive interviews. It’s a lot sh*t you gotta put up with.

Having a show every night, and having the same energy and the same vibe to perform the same show that you have been performing 40 nights in a row, a lot of people can’t do that sober. That’s why a lot of artists don’t follow a template. We have a different lifestyle than the average person, and it gets difficult sometimes.